What's the best IT asset management software in 2026?

GLPI comes from Teclib', a French publisher, and it's open source under the GPL. It does two jobs: IT asset inventory and an ITIL-style help desk. Add license tracking, contracts, suppliers and a knowledge base, and it's the broadest tool on this list for zero license cost.

Inventory runs through GLPI Agent on Windows, Linux, macOS and Android. The same agent handles network discovery and SNMP inventory, so it picks up printers and switches that can't run an agent. You don't need a second scanner for network gear.

The cloud price is the simplest we found: €19 per technician per month, with unlimited assets. Two technicians managing 500 devices pay €38 a month. GLPI only lists this price in euros, and the data is hosted in France on OVHcloud, which matters if you have EU customers. The public cloud caps inventory at 500 agent submissions an hour; beyond that, submissions are blocked for an hour, so stagger your agents' schedules.

The downside shows up on forums: setup takes time, and an update can break a plugin. Self-hosted, keep a test copy and update that one first. One admin on r/sysadmin runs it for daily scans across several sites without touching the ticketing side at all.

Tip: still running the old FusionInventory agent? Both agents can run side by side with different server URLs, so you can move machine by machine.

Freshservice is Freshworks' service desk. It's a polished help desk first, with asset management on top. It discovers devices two ways: an agent on Windows, Mac and Linux, and a Discovery Probe that scans the network without agents. It can also pull in an existing SCCM inventory.

Technician seats are clear: $19 per agent per month on Starter, $49 on Growth, $99 on Pro, billed annually. Asset management is sold in packs of 500 units, from $125 a month. Read that part closely. A desktop or phone counts as 1 unit. A server, VM or network device counts as 4.

Do the math before you sign. 400 laptops plus 30 servers is 520 units, so you're into a second pack. Devices discovered beyond your quota aren't managed; they go to a trash list. In the Freshworks community, customers call the packs expensive when most of their assets are entered by hand through CSV anyway.

Software and SaaS license management only comes with the ITAM Pro plan. And it's cloud only: no self-hosted option.

Tip: purge duplicates and powered-off VMs before each renewal. Each one costs you four units for nothing.

AssetExplorer is ManageEngine's asset management product. Unlike GLPI and Freshservice, it has no help desk: it only does assets, and it goes deep. Agent and agentless discovery, barcodes, QR codes, RFID tags, full hardware lifecycle.

Its strength is software license compliance. It matches installed software against purchased licenses, handles suites, and assigns licenses automatically. When a vendor announces an audit, that report is what saves you. Smaller companies pay proportionally more in audit penalties than large ones, and Microsoft is the publisher admins fear most.

The free edition has no time limit: 25 assets on your own server, 50 in the cloud. That's enough for a very small office or a pilot in one department. Beyond that, the cloud plan for 250 assets is $1,245 a year, or $115 month to month; on your own server it's $955 a year.

The catch: the interface is dense and takes learning. Plan a few days to tune discovery and license rules before the reports are reliable.

Tip: pay annually. $1,245 a year versus 12 times $115 ($1,380) saves you about 10% on the 250-asset cloud plan.

Snipe-IT isn't a scanner, it's a register. It tracks your hardware, licenses, accessories and consumables, and above all who has what. You check a laptop out to a person, print its QR label, and check it back in when they leave. For an IT team that lends a lot of equipment, it's very clean.

It's open source, and the vendor, Grokability, says it always will be free. Self-hosted, it costs nothing. If you'd rather not host it, the vendor does it for $39.99 a month with unlimited users and assets, then $99.99 and $249.99 for bigger setups.

The big limit: it discovers nothing on its own. Devices come in by hand, by CSV import, through its API or community scripts like Jamf2Snipe for Macs. CSV imports are picky: headers must match exactly and each model must exist first, as several GitHub issues show.

Plenty of schools and companies pair it with a scanner: Snipe-IT for the list and labels, another tool for what's actually on the network.

Tip: create every hardware model before your first import, then import a ten-row file to check the columns. It beats fixing a thousand records by hand.

OCS Inventory NG is a French open source project that spent years as GLPI's sidekick: OCS collected the inventory, GLPI managed the rest through a plugin. Its agents run on Windows, Linux, Unix, macOS and Android. It also scans the network for devices without an agent and queries printers and switches over SNMP.

It's free, and that's the only price: no support pricing is published. You install it, maintain it and update it yourself.

Its limit fits in one sentence: it only does inventory. No tickets, no contracts, and a dated interface. Now that the GLPI agent does the same job, many teams are moving from OCS to the GLPI agent in stages. The trap is duplicates: the same machine reported twice, once by each agent.

Tip: if you migrate, pick a single unique key per machine (the serial number, not the hostname) and clean up duplicates in the first week.